Van Hinsbergen

It is quite simply a geological mess: everything is curved, broken, and stacked, compared to this, the Himalayas, for example, represent a rather simple system. There you can follow several large fault lines across a distance of more than 2000 km.

Forget Atlantis, without realizing it, vast numbers of tourists spend their holiday each year on the lost continent of Greater Adria.

Most mountain chains that we investigated originated from a single continent that separated from North Africa more than 200 million years ago, the only remaining part of this continent is a strip that runs from Turin via the Adriatic Sea to the heel of the boot that forms Italy.

It is quite simply a geological mess : Everything is curved, broken and stacked, compared to this, the Himalayas, for example, represent a rather simple system. There you can follow several large fault lines across a distance of more than 2,000 kilometers.

Subduction, the plunging of one plate under the other, is the basic way in which mountain chains are formed, our research provided a large number of insights, also about volcanism and earthquakes, that we are already applying elsewhere. You can even predict, to a certain extent, what a given area will look like in the far future.

From this mapping emerged the picture of Greater Adria, and several smaller continental blocks too, which now form parts of Romania, North Turkey or Armenia, for example, the deformed remnants of the top few kilometers of Greater Adria can still be seen in the mountain ranges. The rest of the piece of continental plate, which was about 100 km thick, plunged under Southern Europe into the earth's mantle, where we can still trace it with seismic waves up to a depth of 1,500 kilometers.